History & local legend
A Philadelphia version of the ghostly-messenger story names physician S. Weir Mitchell as its doctor. One snowy night, a girl supposedly arrived at his door asking him to help her sick mother. Mitchell had already gone to bed, but dressed and followed her to the house.
He found the woman suffering from pneumonia and treated her. Once she was resting more comfortably, he praised the daughter who had known to fetch a doctor. The mother replied that the girl had died a month earlier. In a closet, Mitchell then found the coat he had just followed through the snow, completely dry.
Evangelist Billy Graham told this version in 1975, and later scholarship traced it as a traveling tale attached to different people and places.
